Sometimes these principles seem to be strictly hostile to each other and
in no respect reciprocal, as where habit in the individual and custom in
society oppose themselves bitterly to free will and advancing thought:
yet even here the special warfare is but the material of a broader and
more subtile alliance. An obstinate fixity in one's bosom often serves
as a rock on which to break the shell of some hard inclosed faculty.
Upon stepping-stones of our _slain_ selves we mount to new altitudes. So
do the antagonisms of these principles in the broader field of society
equally conceal a fundamental reciprocation. By the opposition to
his thought of inert and defiant custom, the thinker is compelled to
interrogate his consciousness more deeply and sacredly; and being
cut off from that sympathy which has its foundation in similarity of
temperaments and traditions, he must fall back with simpler abandonment
upon the pure idea, and must seek responses from that absolute nature of
man which the men of his time are not human enough to afford him. This
absolute nature, this divine identity in man, underrunning times,
temperaments, individualities, is that which poet and prophet must
address: yet to speak _to_ it, they must speak _from_ it; to be heard
by the universal heart, they must use a universal language. But
this marvellous vernacular can be known to him alone whose heart is
universal, in whom even self-love is no longer selfish, but is a pure
respect to his own being as it is Being. Well it is, therefore, that
here and there one man should be so denied all petty and provincial
claim to attention, that only by speaking to Man as Man, and in the
sincerest vernacular of the human soul, he can find audience; for thus
it shall become his need, for the sake of joy no less than of duty, to
know himself purely as man, and to yield himself wholly to his immortal
humanity. Thus does fixed custom force back the most moving souls, until
they touch the springs of inspiration, and are indued with power: then,
at once potent and pure, they gush into history, to be influences, to